Evernote Plus Ripoff

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I'm experiencing a very annoying issue. I have been an Evernote customer for almost 10 years. I had the premium account for most of this time when that was your standard paying plan. Recently you guys changed your plans and of a sudden, the same premium plan was costing a lot more. Since I only upload a tiny amount of data each month, mostly text, when you wrote me to tell me my subscription was changing I went with the PLUS subscription.
Here's the problem... Now your desktop app is refusing to sync certain notes that I created years ago because they are over 50MB. So I keep getting sync issues every time I want to view one of these old notes. This is absolutely unacceptable... This is data that I uploaded as a premium member. I have already paid for them. They shouldn't stop syncing because I'm a PLUS member now. It's also a very poor way to treat long standing paying costumers. I'm paying as much as I used to but for a ***** service.
I'm extremely annoyed. I doubt I upload in average more than 1MB a month. I was happy to pay for the premium service for all those years. To be suddenly ripped off and sold a ***** plan that doesn't sync at the same price as my old premium plan is such a poor way to treat long standing existing costumers...
Please fix this.

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What is the use of a note that you cannot edit. I think it "edits" it just by viewing it. I mean the second you even lick on anything in it it's being "edited". And so it ill stop syncing . I mean seriously this is so offensive a design/business strategy really makes you wonder about the management of this company.

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"Edit" is any action on the note. Viewing is not enough, but if you just type one "space", comma etc. into the note, it is treated as changed and will sync (or try to do so). Because it is marked as "changed", the full note will sync. EN will not join the little sync into the big note existing on the server. It syncs the full thing.

Viewed from how long you are with EN, I perfectly understand that you are annoyed by the limit that you did not experience when the note was created.

On the other hand, EN has decided to let all those stay in an account type "Plus" that they have stopped to sell to new users, like me. Other companies (I made such an experience just half a year ago) sends a notification that from date xx.yy.zz they will discontinue the service A, and offer to switch to B or C, maybe with a start discount. They did honor my existing account until the last day, and I could have taken my data and exit in due time, so I think they behaved in an acceptable way, even when I would have preferred to continue with the old model.

In short: You have an alternative - I did not get it, it was "take it or leave it". And still it was o.k., it was not discriminating against me, but business development.

Workaround: Typically a note will be that "fat" because of one or several attachments. Split it up to go under the magical number, and it should sync again. And yes, you probably do not want workarounds ...

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Thank you. I'm not debating the technicalities here but rather this ridiculous design/business strategy that purposely creates sync errors (that is what I'm getting a sync ERROR) because of note seize on notes OF WHICH DATA I UPLOADED AS A PREMIUM USER; Shouldn't those notes be allowed to continue to sync forever? These uploads were well within my monthly allowance as a premium member. I paid for this upload allowance

I recall very clearly Evernote asking me to put everything in it as a forever database for my digital life. THIS WAS THEIR SALES PITCH. If you do this you have a responsibility towards your costumers to treat the data they entrust in your service with care and respect. You need to provide stability and reliability.

There is no argument in favour of this "now your old notes won't sync anymore" move. I am STILL a paying costumer. Not a good look...

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Thank you. I'm not debating the technicalities here but rather this ridiculous design/business strategy that purposely creates sync errors (that is what I'm getting a sync ERROR) because of note seize on notes OF WHICH DATA I UPLOADED AS A PREMIUM USER; Shouldn't those notes be allowed to continue to sync forever? These uploads were well within my monthly allowance as a premium member. I paid for this upload allowance

I understand the frustration, but just WRT this specific argument: To me, it seems that any action done on a note that requires a sync necessarily has to take place under one's current subscription status. In my understanding, EN does not undertake to let us upload large amounts of data once for a price and then sync it free forever. Every time the note must sync, there is activity on their servers and Web connectivity that they must pay for; a pay-once-sync-free-forever business strategy would, IMHO, be a losing one. So I would respectfully disagree with your statement in your OP that "This is data that I uploaded as a premium member. I have already paid for them." You did pay to upload, but not to access and sync indefinitely.

But all this only raises @DTLow's question why it needs to sync just for you to look at it. Is this in the Windows desktop program? I agree that it shouldn't need to sync if the note is stored, unchanged, in your local EN database. One approach might be to upgrade to Premium for one month only, access this and any other very large notes, and then either split them up as @PinkElephant suggests, or transfer them into a local notebook that you create for this purpose (to hold large notes that you never expect to edit again). Then when the month is up, drop back to Plus. But that assumes that it would be possible to revert to Plus, which I'm not sure about.

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An Observation, not a warranty: I was now for 6 month with Premium on my hard earned EN points. This was over now, so I reactivated my normal Premium-for-a-fee status. I used the iOS function for it, App Store.

I have joined EN after they switched off PLUS membership. But in the App Store PLUS was offered to me, alternatively to PREMIUM. I signed into Premium because PLUS has some restrictions I do not like.

But at least in the IOS App Store it seems one can still sign or at least renew a plus membership when it is by re-signing an existing paid account. This is my observation only, if they would have let me sign into PLUS if I tried I do not know.

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Now your desktop app is refusing to sync certain notes that I created years ago because they are over 50MB. So I keep getting sync issues every time I want to view one of these old notes.

This is exactly why I am not upgrading my subscription. It would be terrible if I changed my subscription some years down the line and suddenly became unable to edit text in notes with larger attachments (or had to go through every single note that exceeds the new limit -- potentially hundreds -- and manually reedit it for the notebook to sync again).

Furthermore, having size limits on notes in local notebooks seems insane. None of the same sync arguments apply -- seems like needless handicapping.

If Evernote manages to figure out how to ensure that I don't lose write access to my notes if my subscription changes I'll upgrade to Premium the same day.

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My understanding is we continue to have read access to our notes regardless of our subscription level.

The issue is edit access.

I know? I don't want to end up in a position where, if I don't renew my premium subscription somewhere down the line, I (a) have to remake hundreds of notes with attachments for the notebook to sync without error, or I (b) lose the ability to edit the text in notes with attachments that exceed the basic subscription limit.

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I know? I don't want to end up in a position where, if I don't renew my premium subscription somewhere down the line, I (a) have to remake hundreds of notes with attachments for the notebook to sync without error, or I (b) lose the ability to edit the text in notes with attachments that exceed the basic subscription limit.

The thing is, as I understand it, that when a note is edited, even just its text, the whole thing has to sync, attachments and all. Evernote intentionally does not track our edits line by line or attachment by attachment. It doesn't make a detailed comparison of the edited note with the version existing on their servers (which I don't think it could do without syncing anyway). All it knows is that the note has changed, and so the whole thing is synced. Obviously one could debate the fairness or wisdom of that. But I believe that is the system, and I can see the point of it.

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Yeah, I totally get the challenge of that, but it's pretty unfortunate from a UX standpoint.

I'm additionally touchy about it because I only use large attachments in local notebooks where there's not much technical rationale for capping note size, so the prospect of losing write access to local notes seems particularly irksome.

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They live forever as is, no sync required. You change the note though and a sync will occur. One thing of which to be careful, if you open an office document even if you don't make any changes it will sync. Better to drag to the desktop and open if you are trying to stay under a limit.

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I've seen many instances, can't say for sure which clients, where notes update for no apparent for reason. Most likely the web client. For me it's just annoying that the sort order changed due to it. Just saying, it happens, so I have some sympathy. You might do a search to get it into view, but don't dare touch the body, once the cursor is in the note anything can happen.

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Somewhat along the same lines, in terms of unpredictability.... I experimented with creating notes in iOS Notes to see if/how much better editor was than Evernote, then sent the notes to Evernote. I decided I didn't like that workflow, so deleted the notes in iOS Note, deleted the Evernote notes and all was fine across all clients. Some days later I opened iOS Evernote, the deleted notes were back and synched with all the other clients again. Again a minor annoyance in comparison to the overall value I get out, but weird stuff does happen.

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The thing is, as I understand it, that when a note is edited, even just its text, the whole thing has to sync, attachments and all. Evernote intentionally does not track our edits line by line or attachment by attachment. It doesn't make a detailed comparison of the edited note with the version existing on their servers (which I don't think it could do without syncing anyway). All it knows is that the note has changed, and so the whole thing is synced. Obviously one could debate the fairness or wisdom of that. But I believe that is the system, and I can see the point of it.

Are you sure about this? I highly doubt that every time I made a tiny change in a note, like add a word, the entire content of the note is re-uplouaded o the cloud. This would just be bad engineering... Also EN DOES keep version history... and I'm guessing they aren't saving the content of each version as duplicate data. That would again be very inefficient.. Where are you getting this information?

With this reasoning, I would reach my monthly max upload by working on the same 100MB note for a couple hours since it would continually be syncing to the cloud....

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They live forever as is, no sync required. You change the note though and a sync will occur. One thing of which to be careful, if you open an office document even if you don't make any changes it will sync. Better to drag to the desktop and open if you are trying to stay under a limit.

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No. Edit/Sync of these oversize notes is a paid service provided by Evernote.

Stop paying and the service stops; it's not a one time fee and forever service

Where are you getting this from? That was not my understanding. Each month we get an upload "allowance" no? Say I uploaded a note a that is 100MB last month, this month my allowance is reset. If I view the note I created last month and add one word of text to it, you're saying that this will then subtract 100MB of uploads to this month?

With this reasoning, I would reach my monthly max upload by working on the same 100MB note for a couple hours since it would continually be syncing to the cloud....

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The thing is, as I understand it, that when a note is edited, even just its text, the whole thing has to sync, attachments and all. Evernote intentionally does not track our edits line by line or attachment by attachment. It doesn't make a detailed comparison of the edited note with the version existing on their servers (which I don't think it could do without syncing anyway). All it knows is that the note has changed, and so the whole thing is synced. Obviously one could debate the fairness or wisdom of that. But I believe that is the system, and I can see the point of it.

Are you sure about this? I highly doubt that every time I made a tiny change in a note, like add a word, the entire content of the note is re-uploaded to the cloud. This would just be bad engineering... Also EN DOES keep version history... and I'm guessing they aren't saving the content of each version as duplicate data. That would again be very inefficient.. Where are you getting this information?

With this reasoning, I would reach my monthly max upload by working on the same 100MB note for a couple hours since it would continually be syncing to the cloud...

I'll admit I can't readily point to a document in Evernote's online Help that says just what I said. It's more a general understanding from experience and what others have said here. There is a Help FAQ on upload limits that does say this:

Quote

Types of actions that use up your monthly upload data:

Editing text inside a note

Editing a file that's attached inside a note

Rotating or deleting a picture inside a note

To me, this makes sense. Evernote doesn't, nor would I want it to, monitor my keystrokes when I'm editing. The only way it could tell how much of a note had changed would be to compare the new version with the version existing on the server--and that would require a sync to upload the new version. I suppose the Windows desktop program could do that comparison; but uploading just part of a note and adding it into the existing server-side version at just the right place sounds tricky too. Formatting could get loused up, for instance.

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Now﻿﻿ your desktop﻿﻿ app﻿ is refusing﻿﻿ to sync certain notes that I created years ago because they are over 50MB. So I keep getting sync issues every time I want to view one of these old notes﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿. ﻿﻿﻿

I get that you would like this to work differently, but now that you know about the limitation, how many notes do you have above 50M that could be a problem? I just checked my 10+ year database and the large ones contained either attachments or photos and only one of them I would expect to edit and some could probably be deleted. The one that I would edit has embedded photos and I could restructure that one to keep photos in a separate note with comments in another note and then include a link back to the note with the photo. That way the note that gets edited is small, and the ones with the large content remain stagnant. A bit of a pain but you can restructure the large notes, or just download the large files and remove them from the service. Of course, the option that Evernote would prefer is if you just remain premium.

If you are getting syncs triggered from just viewing notes then I would open a support ticket. That should not happen. There is a user request to add a lock, read only capability, to notes. Having that feature available would be useful here.

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Are﻿ you sure about﻿ this? I highly doubt that every time I made a tiny change in a note, like add a word, the entire content of the note is re-uplouad﻿ed o the cloud﻿.﻿﻿﻿﻿

This is not relevant to your issue (account level limit on oversize notes and forever allowance)
but it can be tested

I have a note close to 200MB. I made small changes to the note on my Mac. The attachments were not changed
I repeated the change/sync 50 times
I'm not seeing any significant change to my upload allowance (yet)
also the sync was super fast

My conclusion is the attachments are not re-uploaded to the cloud, just the small note data
Tested on a Mac

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This is not relevant to your issue (account level limit on oversize notes and forever allowance)
but it can be tested

I have a note close to 200MB. I made small changes to the note on my Mac. The attachments were not changed
I repeated the change/sync 50 times
I'm not seeing any significant change to my upload allowance (yet)
also the sync was super fast

My conclusion is the attachments are not re-uploaded to the cloud, just the small note data

It is relevant though. My issue is that old notes over 50MB are now giving me sync errors. I was saying that this shouldn't be because this is data that I have ALREADY uploaded to the cloud when I was a premium member and was well within my monthly allowance. Dave and other members seem to be telling me that the reason I'm getting this error is because EN re-uploads the entire note even if all I do is add a text character and hence I am now running against this limit of 50MB because I am taxing the servers for a service I am not paying for. But clearly your experiment shows that is doesn't re-upload the entire content of the note. That was my point... Such a modification would only take up a tiny amount of my monthly allowance, no matter the seize of the note. HENCE, it is arbitrary that I am getting this sync error on these notes since I am not asking EN to add large quantities of data to its cloud, I'm mostly accessing data that was already uploaded to its cloud years ago under a premium subscription....

The experiment you made (thank you) just goes to show that there is no practical reason for these sync errors other than to force me to re-subscribe to premium... My old notes aren't somehow taxing Evernote's servers ...

I'm not sure if you get my point?

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I get that you would like this to work differently, but now that you know about the limitation, how many notes do you have above 50M that could be a problem? I just checked my 10+ year database and the large ones contained either attachments or photos and only one of them I would expect to edit and some could probably be deleted. The one that I would edit has embedded photos and I could restructure that one to keep photos in a separate note with comments in another note and then include a link back to the note with the photo. That way the note that gets edited is small, and the ones with the large content remain stagnant. A bit of a pain but you can restructure the large notes, or just download the large files and remove them from the service. Of course, the option that Evernote would prefer is if you just remain premium.

If you are getting syncs triggered from just viewing notes then I would open a support ticket. That should not happen. There is a user request to add a lock, read only capability, to notes. Having that feature available would be useful here.

Yes, of course I can do this and thank you for suggesting it. I jus really find it offensive to be getting sync ERRORS. It seems reckless in terms of data integrity. The just isn't any reason to subject costumers to this kind of thing really... Just bad policy.

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It is relevant though. My issue is that old notes over 50MB are now giving me sync errors. I was saying that this shouldn't be because this is data that I have ALREADY uploaded to the cloud when I was a premium member and was well within my monthly allowance. Dave and other members seem to be telling me that the reason I'm getting this error is because EN re-uploads the entire note even if all I do is add a text character and hence I am now running against this limit of 50MB because I am taxing the servers for a service I am not paying for. But clearly your experiment shows that is doesn't re-upload the entire content of the note. That was my point... Such a modification would only take up a tiny amount of my monthly allowance, no matter the seize of the note. HENCE, it is arbitrary that I am getting this sync error on﻿ these notes since I am not asking EN to add large quantities of data to its cloud, I'm mostly accessing data that was already uploaded to its cloud years ago under a premium subscription....

Safe bet that you're not running up against a monthly upload limit; instead, it's a note size limit.

The rule is a limit of 50MB per note for Plus users (see https://help.evernote.com/hc/en-us/articles/209005247-Evernote-system-limits). Yes, you can keep notes that are larger than that if you had a premium account before, but you cannot edit them. Doesn't matter whether the sync is smart enough to sync only a little bit of the note, 50MB is the limit for Plus note sizes. If you want to view these notes, Evernote should let you do it, as far as I can tell from Evernote's rules. But edit, no, sorry. And if the question is whether Evernote could express that more clearly when this rule is violated, I'd agree. A sync error is not a good user message (though maybe the details are in your error log); I'd call that a bug and if you feel offended by it, sure, whatever. But nobody can make changes to notes larger then their note limit, no matter what that note limit is.

If you want to be able to edit larger notes than 50MB, then you'll need to go to Premium.

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I jus really find it offensive to be getting sync ERRORS. It seems reckless in terms of data integrity. The just isn't any reason to subject costumers to this kind of thing really... Just bad policy.

I'm not following why you think it is reckless. The service is informing you that they can't sync those notes. That is accurate under Evernote's current policy. I do think they could do a better job informing why those notes triggered a sync error, especially in this case where a service downgrade prevents editing of those notes. Just curious, is there any detail provided in the log file?